First (test) photos taken with my new old lens

I’ve spent all my breaks and free minutes both yesterday and until noon today with my new old lens – on my film camera, where it belongs to. And again, which looks like this when paired:

My new old lens again. I used it with film today.

I took this picture with my 45mm/1.8 Micro Four Thirds “portrait lens”, and with the modeling light of one of my studio flashes (with a socked beauty dish mounted to it). Didn’t use the flash since I didn’t want to kill the background light from the kitchen.

When I had filled my third roll of Tri-X at noon (approximately half of these using this new lens), I brought the films to the local drugstore for development, and mounted the lens to my digital E-M10 camera, using an OM/µ43rds adapter. I took lots of photos already, but nothing serious or worth to be shown. What I can tell so far is that the lens is indeed sharp. It can show a bit of “fringing” when shot wide open against lights, which is to be expected – there’s no automatic correction since the camera doesn’t even “know” which lens is mounted to it. Otherwise, there’s no big difference between using it wide open and stopping it down, and it shouldn’t – on Micro Four Thirds, you’ll be using only the middle quarter of the area of film.

Here’s our bookshelf from a few minutes ago, with the lens wide open at f/2.8:

And here’s the same two stops down at f/5.6:

Really not much of a difference – even at 100% I can read the description on the pack of HP ink just fine, and everything else looks good as well. And it stays this way until at least f/11 – if you stop down any further, you’ll notice some beginning diffraction at f/16, and more of it at f/22.

I’ll use it more over the coming days, and show more photos as soon as I have some. But the real proof will of course be the films, which should be ready in 10-14 days. If I see some good results from those, I’ll scan the negatives and show them as well.